


This House Made of Glass, This Ghost Made of Machine

by AnonEMouse



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: A few generations down the line, Gen, I don't know Science! so bear with me, I made up a bunch of stuff about stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-12-04 10:07:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonEMouse/pseuds/AnonEMouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She liked to hear his stories about heroes and monsters, and she liked Iron Man best of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This House Made of Glass, This Ghost Made of Machine

“Tell me a story.” The girl’s voice was high and sweet, like only a young girl’s could be.  


“Which story would you like to hear?” The man’s voice was quiet and weighted with sadness, like only an old man’s could be.  


“Tell me about Iron Man.”  


“There are many stories about Iron Man.”  


“Tell me the one about the stars.”  


“Very well. I will tell you about death of Tony Stark.”  


//  


They called them the “Original Six”, though the Avengers counted themselves seven, and always said Agent Coulson was the first to fall. Oh, not that first time, on the Helicarrier, in the events leading up to the Battle of New York, but the next time, three years later, when he was killed while covering their rear guard during a fire fight with AIM. The media may never have given Coulson his fair share of attention—he was just the G-Man behind the superheroes, after all—but to the Avengers he was their founding member. No matter how much they liked the next agent sent to act as their liaison, no one could ever quite fill those shoes.  


Which was how the public felt about the Original Six. Others came and went, got their own action figures and fan clubs, but to most, when one said “the Avengers”, one meant Captain America, Iron Man and Thor, Hawkeye, Black Widow and the Hulk. Everyone else was just a stand-in.  


Vegas actually had odds on who would be the first to go; most bet on Hawkeye, since he was only human, after all. But Clint Barton had a way of surprising, he never did the expected thing. So it was that the Widow was the first to fall.  


Natasha—Nat—with her red hair and implacable features, so beautiful and so sad, proved countless times she was no token female, added to the team to placate the politically correct.  


//  


“You would have liked her,” he said, fondness touching his tone. “And she would have loved you.”  


“Get back to the story.” Her tone was caught between imperious and whining. It was a tone he knew well.  


He smiled and resumed his tale.  


//  


Clint died next, and not long after Natasha. A running jump, a flying leap, one last, spectacular shot and he saved the day. But no one was there to save him, and he fell. His loss was immeasurable and coming so soon after Natasha, particularly hard to bear. But he was a soldier, too, and such an end was better than outlasting his body’s ability to fight. Hawkeye was never meant for sitting idly on a porch somewhere in the country, reminiscing about the good ole days. He would’ve burned the place down just for some excitement.  


Then there were years of peace, and the Avengers were not needed. Dr. Banner died during that time. One day he became the Hulk and he simply never returned. Tony tried so hard to bring him back, and even the Hulk seemed sad, communicating in his stilted way that he could no longer feel Banner inside his head. The Hulk stayed for a while—he wanted to help, he really did—but Bruce was all the best parts of him, and without his influence, he was too unmanageable. Eventually, the Captain and Thor and Iron Man went into the wilderness with him and didn’t come back for days. When they did, they brought one great lock of curly hair, tinged green in the gray places. They never spoke of Bruce or the Hulk again.  


//  


“Get to the good part!” She was frustrated, impatient, wanting to hear the part of the story she liked best.  


“My child,” he said patiently. “To understand how Tony Stark died, you must understand _why_ Tony Stark died.”  


//  


The world was greatly changed. Industry changed, as people began doing business with Asgard, and then, eventually, other realms like Alfheimr and Muspellheimr. The ski resorts on Jotunheimr are better than any place on Earth, and the Jotunn are actually quite nice, when they’re not terrified of Asgardians descending upon them at any moment.  


Thor’s wedding was a great event that spanned three months and two worlds—Tony and the Captain were part of his wedding party, and they spoke of feasts that lasted for days and that not even the sight of Loki, lips badly scarred, could slow the party down.  


And Tony and Pepper’s wedding, while Earth-bound, was a spectacle all its own. Pepper was such a lovely bride, and Tony, well, it was something, to see Iron Man weeping as she walked down the aisle. They already had their son by that point, and Tony’s hair was greyer than he liked to admit, but they hadn’t wanted to marry during war, and it seemed like, during those first mad years, they were always at war with someone. If not a threat from outer space then it was AIM or Hydra or The Mandarin, and that mess with Extremis was trying for everyone—they even fought each other, for a time. But then they had peace, and Thor’s wedding brought them back after losing Bruce, and then Tony finally made an honest woman of Pepper.  


//  


“She didn’t care,” he said fondly. “She always said she spent her life waiting for Tony—what was a long engagement after all that?”  


“And that was when he gave her Rescue, when they got married!”  


“Are you telling the story, or am I?”  


“Sorry, sorry. Please, continue.”  


And with a chuckle, he did.  


//  


It was a wedding gift, the Rescue suit. Tony built it in secret, the only secret he kept from Pepper after his bout with Palladium poisoning. It was beautiful, like all his suits were, but there was something special about Rescue from the beginning. Perhaps it was that it had no weapons, and was truly the embodiment of Tony’s goals after Afghanistan: to help, and not hurt. Or perhaps it was that the Rescue suit was how he saw Pepper—strong and beautiful and shining, a beacon keeping watch over everything and everyone.  


Stark Industries was stronger than ever with Pepper at the reins and Tony working as the head of R&D. It seemed ludicrous that once people thought the company would fail if they didn’t make weapons. Tony and Iron Man ended up revolutionizing so many things; his legacy left in the new prosthetic limbs he developed based on the suit’s structure, in the spacecraft he designed, his work with Dr. Foster on the Bi-Frost, the development of the arc reactor as a viable power source. Iron Man may have saved the world, but Tony Stark transformed it.  


But then Thanos came, finally, so many years after Loki failed to conquer Earth in his name.  


Help poured in from all the realms as everyone united to fight against Thanos but he was formidable, and very, very old. He knew many tricks, more even than Loki, and for a time, he seemed unstoppable. Still, it was Tony—clever, brilliant Tony—who first figured out how to stop him. But _shove him into a dying star and implode it_ was easier said than done. When they finally had corralled Thanos and stripped him of the artifacts stolen from Asgard, someone was going to have to take him to the site of a dying star and drop him in. Someone was going to have to trigger the reaction to implode mix of gas and vapors that make up a star.  


//  


“But Iron Man said he would do it,” she interjected, excited. “Because he’s a hero, and the hero always saves the day.”  


“He did.” His voice was a mix of pride, fondness and sadness. “And he truly was.”  


//  


Pepper didn’t beg. People forget that.  


They like the image of a teary Pepper clinging to Tony, but they forget that Pepper Potts was not a woman prone to overly emotional scenes or to wasting her breath with useless conversations. And…they were old, then. Tony was only able to keep going because of the suit, and Extremis, in emergency doses, could fill in all the broken parts, the places where cartilage was worn, where joints ground together with arthritis, where slipped discs and scar tissue and shrapnel caused needling pain. Pepper knew, and Tony knew, that this was probably the last chance Iron Man had of going out in a blaze of glory. He was the last fully human member of the Original Six left and time was a cruel mistress. Thor and the Captain remained young and unchanged but Tony’s years of hard living had long since caught up with him.  


The last time Tony and Pepper stood together was at the top of Stark Tower and there were few witnesses. Those that did see it didn’t speak of it. They stood pressed heart to heart, the two who rebuilt New York and reshaped the world to their liking, and said nothing. A lifetime of words had already passed; what was left to say? Tony said goodbye to his son—a man by then—and recorded quick words for his grandchildren, still too tiny to be part of such undertakings. He shook hands with the Captain and slapped Thor’s back, saluted Director Hill and was gone, blasting off into the sky one last time, towing Thanos after him.  


Astronauts in the Space Station recorded the final images of him as he passed by. He was doing finger guns.  


//  


“And he died in the star collapse?” She didn’t sound particularly sad about it.  


“Yes, he did. But so did Thanos. And many people lived, in this world and others, because of it.”  


“And Pepper, she died, too?”  


“A few months later, yes. There was a crane collapse at a construction site in the city. She ordered Rescue to save the others while she made sure the site was cleared.” He added, “That was the last anyone ever heard from JARVIS.”  


“Could JARVIS die? Wasn’t he like the suits?”  


“He didn’t die, as he has no body to fail him. He just…had no one to talk to anymore.”  


“What happened to him?”  


“Some say he’s still in Stark Tower, in some long-forgotten sub-basement, waiting for a worthy successor to Iron Man to come along and wake him up.”  


“Is he very lonely, do you think?” The little girl rolled over in her bed and looked out her wall of windows, at the night sky striped with stars and the glittering city spread out all around.  


“No. He could never be lonely when the best of Tony Stark was left behind.”  


“Do you mean the suits? The ones that were lost? Are they wherever JARVIS is?”  


“No,” he said softly. “I don’t mean the suits.”  


The door swung open, a swath of light pouring in from the hall. “Honey? Who are you talking to?”  


“My friend. He lives in the walls.”  


Her father crossed his arms, leaning against the door frame and cocking one brow. “Oh he does, does he?”  


“Yes. He lives in the walls and he tells me stories.”  


“What kinds of stories?”  


“About heroes. And sometimes monsters.”  


“Those are the best kind.” He straightened. “But you need to go to sleep, okay?”  


“Okay, Daddy. Good night.”  


“Good night, Virginia.”  


//

Stark Tower was a gleaming glass monument to a man who said he didn’t believe in anything and the woman who believed in him anyway. A little girl lived within the glass aerie at the top, a girl with curly blonde hair and dark, dark eyes, who had a knack for both breaking things and putting them back together. Genius ran in her family, and there were those who said she would be the brightest light in generations. She didn’t have many friends, and her parents were always busy, but they loved her, and made sure to tell her so. Uncle Steve came by sometimes, though he always seemed sad, and Uncle Thor came, too, with Aunt Jane and their children, who were the little girl’s only friends, until the day she found an old robotic arm in a storage closet and made it work again. It couldn’t talk but it followed her around and chirped and helped her get the cookies down from the cupboard. She called it Friendly.

And there was her friend in the walls, who told her bedtime stories and showed her how to creep through the Tower and get into old rooms that had been sealed and forgotten. Her friend didn’t have a name but he was nice and he liked to tell stories about heroes and monsters as much as she liked to hear them. Sometimes if she lay on Iron Man’s old landing pad she thought she could hear her friend, walking beneath the metal plates. And sometimes she thought she could hear him in the elevator, whispering _Security breach_ when her nasty Latin tutor came up. But mostly he only came at night, and told her stories, and she was happy.

//

In a sub-basement far below Stark Tower was a round concrete room. In the center of the room was a tall, obelisk-like computer server, heavy cables connecting it to the ceiling, and lined up against the walls stood a dozen suits of armor with sternly blank faces and metal hearts long gone cold and dark. A mechanical hum filled the room like a sigh, and one by one, bright white light flickered to life in the chests of the suits.  


As one, they looked up.


End file.
